Ice hockey heartache may not end for 737 days

To watch Jonathon Kalinski (left) play for the Phantoms in the American… (Contributed photo, The…)

October 06, 2012|Paul Carpenter

We already are well into October and the withdrawal symptoms are starting to appear. Where oh where can we go for an excitement fix?

What are we supposed to watch on television? Dr. Phil? Illiterate hicks catching fish with their bare hands in a yucky swamp? Hideous creatures repossessing cars? Baseball, which is boring enough even when the Phillies or IronPigs are still in contention?

Optimistically, there are 737 days, give or take a few, before Allentown can have its first American Hockey League game in its new arena, now under construction over the city's famous sinkhole. Meanwhile, the people in and around Glens Falls, N.Y., will be enjoying what should be our AHL team, currently called the Adirondack Phantoms, affiliated with the Philadelphia Flyers.

News about the Flyers is not much better.

The National Hockey League has canceled its first two weeks of the 2012-13 season because of the lack of a contract between the league and the players union. The last collective bargaining agreement expired Sept. 15, and the players have been locked out since then, with no sign of a resumption of negotiations.

They are at loggerheads over how to divvy up — between players and team owners — $3.3 billion in NHL revenue. Previous contracts gave players 57 percent of the pot and this year league owners demanded 57 percent for themselves, but later offered to cut it to 53 percent.

The season was supposed to start Thursday, and about 100 NHL players already have jumped ship.

They include two Flyers stars, Claude Giroux and Danny Briere, who signed with the Berlin team of the German pro hockey league. I hope they come back if the negotiators make a deal, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

On the other hand, it was announced that former Flyers coach Terry Murray will be the new head coach of the Phantoms. He took the Flyers to the Stanley Cup finals in 1997, so that is a promising development.

My wife and I get to only a couple of Flyers games each season, but we rarely miss one on television. You should see her during those games. She yells "shoot the puck" and other helpful suggestions at the TV and has decidedly partisan opinions about the refs — rage when they call one against the Flyers, for doing anything short of murder, and glee when they stick an opposing player in the box.

Years ago, when we lived in the Harrisburg area, she got a bad case of laryngitis after yelling all the way through an AHL game featuring the Hershey Bears. We had great fun teasing her about that, and she could not respond until her voice came back a couple of days later.

There are some pretty good hockey games in the Lehigh Valley. Lehigh University has a team that plays at the Steel Ice Center in Bethlehem. Their next game is at 7 p.m. Saturday, against a team from Penn State's Berks campus, and there are other amateur games at various rinks.

My wife is a hockey snob, however, and gets worked up only over the Olympics or the NHL and AHL games. (The AHL may be called a minor league, but the skill level of its players is on a par with NHL players, and many go back and forth between NHL teams and their AHL affiliates.)

I have not been very kind in my comments about the Allentown arena, which was designed by officials and wheeler-dealers to score political points by saying it will help revitalize the city's steadily deteriorating downtown area. That, however, is the worst conceivable location, from the point of view of hockey fans.

Traffic is bad getting into and out of that area now and there are no significant plans yet announced to improve it before adding, say, 4,000 cars on each night of a home game.

On Friday, The Morning Call reported that the arena authority had closed a $224 million bond sale to finance the arena, which means that, with interest, $444.4 million will have to be repaid over the next 30 years by ... well, somebody.

The fabulous financing is part of a razzle-dazzle deal arranged by state Sen. Pat Browne, R-Lehigh, and the tax-break legislation he engineered.

The $224 million will be used, it was reported, to build an 8,500-seat arena and other facilities, and have them open by the start of the 2014-15 AHL season. Also in the $272 million complex are an office building and a hotel, which, if they can fit 40 or so people in each room after a game, will help ease the traffic problem. (The Marx Brothers had that many in a room one time.)

Looking forward to the arena opening only 737 days away, I have made plans for how to cope with the post-game gridlock.

My office is walking distance from the arena, and if the guard will let my wife in, we can set up a couple of cots in the newsroom. (We do not care for Marx Brothers hotel rooms.)

For those who do not have an office, or home, near the arena, I recommend helicopters.